Friday at Five: Surveys and Reports Showing Impacts of COVID

In our disrupted time of COVID, what are we learning, how are we performing, and what are the impacts in healthcare? Here are recent reports and surveys with some answers and as always leaving us with more questions.

Surescripts Report

Health IT Adoption & Innovation During COVID-19: 2020 Milestones
September 2020

As the health industry continues to grapple with COVID-19, a new Surescripts report shows that providers are increasingly leveraging technology innovations to streamline processes, share information and improve patient care. Health systems, pharmacies and health plans are adapting to this new era of “touchless healthcare,” reaching a number of major adoption and innovation milestones for electronic prescribing, prescription price transparency and electronic case reporting to public health authorities.

Kaufman Hall Report

National Flash Report
August 2020

Hospital Operating Margins have plunged 96% since the start of 2020 in comparison with the first seven months of 2019, according to a new Kaufman Hall report, as uncertainty and volatility continue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those results do not include federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Even with that aid, however, Operating Margins are down 28% year-to-date compared to January-July 2019. Operating Margins fell 2% year-over-year in July without the CARES Act relief, according to the latest edition of Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report. Hospitals also saw flat year-over-year gross revenue performance in July, continued high per-patient expenses, and a fifth consecutive month of volumes falling below 2019 performance and below budget. From June to July, however, hospital Operating Margins were up 24%, likely due to a backlog in demand resulting from the shutdown of many non-urgent services in the early months of the pandemic. These and more insights are outlined in the report.

Updox Report

2020 Virtual Care Report: Patient Care in a Post-COVID World
August 2020

New report from Updox highlights what it will take to transform healthcare practices, keep pace with changing patient expectations and fix reimbursement hurdles. The report details the rapid transformation telehealth saw during COVID-19, how it is currently being used, physician and patient expectations for telehealth post-COVID — and how virtual care spanning the entire patient experience will become the new precedent. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth became the new norm almost overnight. According to new survey data, while most practices and health systems had already employed some type of technology to manage patient intake and appointment reminders, only 18.7% offered telehealth. Once COVID hit, however, providers saw an urgent need to connect with their patients and provide care in a safe and effective way and doing so was their primary concern. As a result, 93.8% of providers reported offering telehealth.

KLAS Report

Vendor Performance in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis
July 23, 2020

The COVID-19 crisis needs no introduction—it has rocked healthcare and will change the world for decades to come. Now, with the first wave definitively underway, what have provideKLAUr organizations in the heart of this crisis reported about their technology and services vendors’ responses? What technologies have organizations relied on the most? What solutions are making the biggest difference? How does COVID-19 change organization budgets and purchasing plans moving forward? What vendors will organizations increasingly look to coming out of this crisis?